Most of us will moan about the cost of insuring high performance sports cars, but there’s a damn good reason insurers make us pay through the nose – they cost an arm and a leg to fix and their drivers will usually, at some stage, wrap them around a tree.
Case in point: Rowan Atkinson. When the Mr. Bean star crashed his McLaren F1 in 2011, we expected the repair bill to be high, but the figure, it has just been revealed, is better described as stratospheric. Insurers have had to paid out a whopping £900,000 to fix the thing, making it the most expensive car insurance repair in British history.
The value of the claim eclipses the £300,000 figure paid by Aviva to fix a pranged Pagani Zonda in 2010.
The exceptionally high cost may have something to do with the fact that the 240mph supercar had spent more than a year being tinkered with by McLaren expert technicians in Woking, Surrey, rather than a local grease monkey. However it’s still staggering considering the fact Atkinson “only” paid £640,000 for the car – two thirds of the repair bill.
The repair job was given the go-ahead because the value of the car has soared in recent years. One model recently sold for a cool £3.5 million.
The accident, which occurred in August 2011, was caused when Atkinson drove over a slippery patch of road near Peterborough. The star, worth £71 million, lost control, hit a tree and destroyed the car, whose 6.1-litre V12 engine was found some 20 yards away from the rest of the mangled vehicle.
Eight years prior, Atkinson had driven his McLaren F1 into the back of a Rover Metro. Maybe it’s time you stuck to the bogey-green Mini Cooper, eh, Beano?
Via: Yahoo
Picture: Paul Franks / SWNS.com
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